In Year After Quake, China Sealed an Opened Door

A mother sitting among the rubble in Beichuan county on Tuesday mourned the death of her daughter, Xiang Yazi, at left in photo, in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.Credit
Jason Lee/Reuters

BEIJING — The earthquake that killed 87,000 people in Sichuan Province in China a year ago this week was a devastating tragedy that, through all the rubble, offered a few rays of hope.

In a rare burst of volunteerism, more than a million people flocked to the quake zone. The nation’s leaders demonstrated their ability to alleviate human suffering by mobilizing 146,000 troops in a matter of days. China’s biggest corporations donated nearly $1 billion. Citizens and celebrities like Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Yao Ming gave hundreds of millions more.

“The great task of earthquake rescue and recovery reminds us again that unity is strength, and that victory can only be gained through struggle,” President Hu Jintao said Tuesday during a somber commemoration, shown live on national television, observing the anniversary of China’s worst natural disaster in more than three decades.

But if China’s response to the earthquake has been widely commended, critics say it did not ultimately change the government’s opaque and authoritarian ways. The relaxed press freedom that accompanied the first weeks of the recovery effort proved to be fleeting. And after vowing to thoroughly investigate why so many school buildings crumbled, killing about 5,300 students by official estimates, the government insisted last week that the wrath of nature, not human malfeasance, was to blame.

“Up until now, we haven’t found that anybody caused or did anything to make buildings more vulnerable,” said Tang Kai, who directs the planning office for the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.

Over the past year, as they tried to expose instances of substandard school construction, bloggers, activists and parents whose children perished under mounds of rubble have been harassed or jailed. Most parents acknowledge that they accepted payments from the government that require them to stay silent on the matter.

In recent weeks, as the anniversary approached, scores of foreign journalists trying to interview aggrieved parents were intimidated and roughed up.

Ai Weiwei, an artist and architect who has organized a campaign to count the number of dead children, said that 20 of his volunteers had been attacked or detained and that his blog postings were frequently deleted. “What the government has done is irresponsible,” said Mr. Ai, one of the few critics who has remained unscathed. “The Chinese people deserve better.”

In the early days of the disaster, there were reasons for encouragement. Hours after the quake struck, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao flew into the quake zone trailed by television cameras. In a country with a history of concealing bad news, Mr. Wen’s very public role consoling survivors and shouting encouraging words to those trapped in the ruins of a flattened school seemed to signal that this disaster would be handled differently.

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“At the beginning, Chinese journalists were very excited to be covering a major natural disaster in what were the most free conditions ever,” said Qian Gang, the author of “The Great China Earthquake,” an account of the 1976 quake that devastated the city of Tangshan and killed at least 240,000 people, which was initially covered up. “But gradually the power of the government seeped back in.”

In an article published last week by China Media Project, a Web site run by the University of Hong Kong, Mr. Qian detailed how many journalists, taking advantage of the chaos, ignored reporting limitations imposed by the central propaganda department. Even dispatches from Xinhua, the state-run news agency, noted that collapsed schools were often surrounded by buildings that appeared unscathed.

Four days after the earthquake, an online chat sponsored by People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, featured officials who stated that “there were certainly quality issues behind the collapse of school buildings, and we will conduct a strict and uncompromising investigation.”

By late June, however, the reins had been fully pulled back. Reporters who did not work for Xinhua or other strictly controlled, state-run media outlets were forced to leave the quake zone. Publications that had questioned the quality of the school buildings were criticized, or in some cases compelled to punish the offending writers and editors.

One reporter said that he and his colleagues had gathered compelling proof that cutting corners and inadequate oversight by local officials contributed to the high student death toll. But, he said, it has become impossible to publish those findings. “At this point, stability outweighs everything else,” said the reporter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity and asked that the name of his employer not be disclosed.

Officials have been less successful in silencing the scores of parents who continue to press for an official accounting of why so many schools collapsed that day.

Liu Xiaoying of Mianzhu, speaking by telephone, explained how she and other parents were not allowed to join the public mourning on Tuesday for fear that they might disrupt the tightly orchestrated commemorative events that were replete with foreign dignitaries. A phalanx of armed officers made sure reporters did not venture into town.

“There has been no government investigation report at all,” said Ms. Liu, whose daughter died at Fuxin No. 2 Primary School. “If there had been, perhaps our grief would not be this great.”

Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

A version of this news analysis appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: In Year After Quake, China Sealed an Opened Door. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe